We were delighted to see that The Good Soldier has made it onto The Guardian‘s list of the 100 best novels of all time, being “a countdown of the greatest literature ever published in English”. The final ranking was constructed from top-10 lists submitted by over 170 novelists, critics, journalists, and academics from across the globe.
Ford’s masterpiece comes in at a respectable number 64, but was beaten by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (at 41) and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (50). Virginia Woolf has five books in the top 100, with Charles Dickens and Jane Austen on four each, and Henry James on three. The list includes 23 translations of non-English novels by names such as Proust, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Mann, Kafka and others. 49 of the top-100 novels were published after Ford’s death, and 24 pre-date his first book in 1891.
The Good Soldier was voted for by YouTube literary content creator Jack Edwards (4th in his top 10), author and critic Steven Poole (6th), literary historian Alexandra Harris (8th), Booker prizewinner Anne Enright (9th), and Guardian books editor Lucy Knight (10th). The only other votes for a Ford work we have found (thanks to John Lavagnino) were both for Parade’s End, by authors Tessa Hadley (7th place) and Joshua Cohen (5th).
As Lisa Allardice observes in her accompanying article, lists such as this are highly subjective. The voters in this case are a broad and distinguished list of literary “insiders”, whose criteria and preferences may well differ substantially from those of a general readership. Whether or not we agree with the list, the value, surely, is in stimulating discussion, and introducing us to some books and authors with which we are unfamiliar.
There was one individual vote for Parade’s End, from Tessa Hadley.
Well spotted – I missed that one. I’ll update the post!